Note that, if you want to get the amount of columns of a table and you're using the "SHOW COLUMNS FROM $table" query, you will have to use mysql_num_rows() instead of mysql_num_fields() on the result. This becomes logical when thinking about it, because the SHOW COLUMNS query returns a result with six columns (Field, Type, Null, Key, Default and Extra) and with a single row for every column found. If you'd count the number of fields, you'd always get 6. If you count the number of rows, you'll get the amount of columns found.